Understanding Agency Obstacles to Enhance Partnerships in 2024 and Beyond

In order to successfully partner with media, advertising and marketing agencies, technology providers need to understand the challenges their partners face on a daily basis.

For context, eMarketer found that the U.S. represents 40% ($350B) of global advertising spend with the “Big Six” agency holding companies representing the majority of that spend. As a result, it’s critical for tech providers to partner with agencies and build relationships in a more meaningful way.

Everyone in our industry knows that relationship-building is essential. To deepen partnerships and create long-lasting relationships, it’s critical to understand exactly what’s keeping your clients up at night.

Whether it’s internal obstacles like talent or client retention or external feats like staying ahead of industry trends, recognizing a shift in your customers’ customers behaviors or just better understanding where your client counterparts are coming from, it’s about connecting to those concerns and growing trust.

Here’s a glimpse at three of the most-pressing issues keeping your agency representatives’ up at night:

Meeting Great Expectations Despite Tight Budgets

As inflation impacted consumer spending, marketing budgets got hit hard—making it essential for agencies to drive increased return on advertising spend (ROAS) and ensure their clients got the most out of every marketing dollar spent. In fact, in the second half of 2023, almost 70% of marketers noted their budgets were cut by at least 5-10%.

Despite budgets shrinking, high expectations remained and agencies faced increased pressure to deliver exceptional outcomes.

In these instances, there’s an opportunity to enhance your client experience and provide agency representatives the additional support they need to show their value to brands, even if results aren’t meeting initial expectations. It’s critical to proactively help your agency partners properly measure against key KPIs and optimize in real-time so every dollar goes further and works harder.

Additionally, stay in communication, be proactive, provide helpful insights and ensure they have the information needed should any questions arise. Simply hopping on a quick call with agency contacts to share additional context can go a long way, while increasing the number of touchpoints to show your value.

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Overcoming Turnover in a Relationship-Focused Industry

Turnover is an unfortunate reality of agency life and working in a fast-paced industry like advertising.

As agencies struggle to keep staff, every part of their business is impacted, namely maintaining client relationships as well as their internal team structures and workflow. Clients even started putting staff retention as an important KPI when choosing an agency partner because of its subsequent business impact. If the account team loses seven people within the span of a year, the brand is paying attention and is likely concerned, even if new hires quickly take their place.

Stability and trust are the crux of relationship-building, making retention an internal pain point for agencies as well as one for both brands and tech providers. The best relationships are also when the agency ultimately views you as an extension of their team through the value you bring and prove everyday.

Folks often choose or align with providers they feel understand their business, so it’s essential to ensure your value shines through. It also makes it increasingly important to strengthen your relationships across the agency and with the client directly. Whether or not your initial point of contact or the account lead remains at the agency for years, you want to ensure your relationships are strong enough outside of one contact, so that regardless of turnover, you’ll remain the go-to service provider with multiple connections across the team.

Surprise & Delight—Staying Ahead in an Ever-Changing Industry to Attract & Retain Business

From immersive creatives tapping VR and AR, to implementing generative AI, and even keeping up with the latest viral Taylor Swift endeavor, agencies are challenged with being one step ahead of trends in a digital media landscape that’s constantly evolving. Proactively bring new insights, ideas and programs to the table even when they aren’t specifically asked for.

Surprising and delighting your agency partner with something new, unique and unprompted not only sets you apart, it establishes you as a go-to, top-of-mind partner for new business. Agencies are considered by brands as the subject matter experts and expected to know what’s new and what’s cutting edge inside and out across emerging media solutions. This presents a huge opportunity for tech providers.

In an industry that’s evolving on a daily basis with a new shiny topic or emerging trend, there’s an opportunity to consistently bring innovative ideas to the table, supporting the agency in developing a solution to deliver impactful solutions to their clients. Don’t solely lean on them for direction. Proactively offer creative solutions that emphasize your knowledge of the industry and show your understanding of the expectations they’re facing. In doing so, you’ll also reinforce your team as an invaluable resource in driving exceptional outcomes.

Yes, it can take years to move from just another vendor to true partner status with a seat at the table with an agency and/or the brand. However, the sooner you use these insights to enhance your client services experience, the faster you’ll get there.

Be transparent, focus on communication, offer unique insights, bring creative ideas to table and you’ll be well on your way to forging a long-lasting agency partnership.

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